Film adaptations of Anthony Trollope’s novels; A proposal to help create interest in Him

It’s time I started posting once again about the 1974 BBC 26 part film adaptation of Trollope’s six Palliser or Parliamentary novels, written by Simon Raven. The last time I posted I wrote an essay on Anthony Trollope as a political novelist and how the Palliser films are only partly presented as about parliamentary politics.

Tonight to start us (or myself) off again, I thought I’d put a filmography of adaptations of Trollope’s novels. In reading general books on film adaptations this week I came across errors about how many, when and what has been adapted. It seemed to me the author guessed Trollope should have some, but didn’t go to the trouble of researching the question any.

I have, using mostly IMDB, corrected and produced a truer list than I’ve seen anywhere else. Another source has been Robert Giddings’s The Classic Serial on Televison and Radio; and I’ve kept information from stray comments here and there on essays on early BBC adaptations.

It is repeatedly said the first film adaptation on BBC (and TV) in a mini-series form of a novel was Trollope’s The Warden. This is not quite true; quite apart from adaptations of popular and other high status older novels, there were earlier ones of Austen’s novels. Starting with radio adaptations (important in themselves and as influencing the early TV adaptations), in 1938 (that early), a “serial reading of Trollope’s Barchester Towers was broadcast on the London regional programme in the summer of 1938″ (p. 9). Trollope’s novels have not dominated the mini-series terrain, but they have always been part of it, and a couple of times major productions have been mounted (with much expense and solid actors and writers).

From Pallisers, 10:20, The Duchess (Susan Hampshire) and Mrs Marie Finn (aka Madame Max Goesler, Barbara Murray) talking of the Duchess’s ambitions as the wife of the Prime Minister

In 1943, in the same year as an early landmark production of Dickens on radio, David Copperfield with Ralph Richardson as Micawber, Trollope’s Barchester Towers was again adapted for radio, this time by H. Oldfield Box, and in ten parts (p. 12). In 1945 it was Dr Thorne, which became a radio mini-series. There have been more recent radio adaptations too, and broadcasts of the older ones.

Here is a list of the TV adaptations as far as my knowledge goes. There has been no movie made for theatres as yet.

1951 BBC, The Warden. It is described as the very first BBC serial of a novel; it was done in 6 episode parts; the screenplay for this first Warden was by Cedric Willis, Kerr, 14. Other adaptations of high status novels had been done before (1938, 55 minute P&P; 1948 105 minute Emma, Kerr and Papill; 1950 one hour American Philco Theatre, live S&S)

1958 BBC The Eustace Diamonds (I know nothing more)

1959 BBC The Last Chronicle of Barset (ditto)

1960 BBC The Small House at Allington (ditto)

1969 a first BBC2 The Way We Live Now (5 episodes of 45 minutes) screenplay Simon Raven, directed James Cellan Jones, and actors include Colin Blakely, Rachel Gurney, Angharad Rees (as Marie Melmotte, made a central character as she was in the later series)

1974 Penrith, Malachi’s Cove, directed and written by Henry Herbert, starring Donald Pleasaunce, Malachi, and Veronica Quilligan, Malachi’s daughter, Mally. Single 90 minute episode from the short story of that name. This was shown in movie theaters in Britain in 1977 under the title The Seaweed Children.

It might have stuck in Trollope’s craw to see ED adapted so early on, but it would not have surprized him. In his Autobiography he wrote how it beat out his finer political novel, The Prime Minister, and a brilliant moving original novel, Nina Balatka, about cultural and psychological conflicts at a deep level in two individuals, one a Jewish outsider, the other a Christian girl, who considers suicide. She almost throws herself into the Charles River:

Recent photo of Charles River, Prague

It would also not have surprised him to see the novel most often adapted thus far is Barchester Towers. He said of it that was the one book by him by the time he wrote his Autobiography which people felt called upon to read. He also said this was reinforced by his writing further Barsetshire books.

There are far fewer of these movies for Trollope than for Austen and a few other Victorian novelists (Dickens, Gaskell, Elliot, Hardy). There is no Companion for Film Adaptations of Trollope. It might be that the number of readers of his novels is not as high as John Letts used to believe (see his preface to my book, Trollope on the Net).

I have recently had an experience which may be the result of a lack of academic interest in Trollope for himself. I was just then reviewing for a respected academic periodical on Victorian Studies to review : The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century, edd. Margaret Markwick, Deborah Denenholz Morse, and Regina Gagnier (Ashgate, 2009, 978-7546-6389-8, $99.96 listed price).

I proposed to an editor also to write about what this volume hopes for: a change in Trollope studies. It was striking at the conference how different the subjects and tone taken towards Trollope from the last conference (admittedly 25 years ago) and also how different from what is often found in the Trollope society (though not always).

What I’d been noticing in the latest Victorian Studies, is how Trollope’s famous novels today (different from those favored say 25 years ago) embody attitudes or agendas that belong to the author’s book or agenda of the book as a whole, but how he is not assessed in his own right. I was bothered by that, and over the past couple of years going to the MLA I have listened to a number of papers on him, but always as embodying this or that attitude, apart from himself. He is not the focus nor Trollope studies as such. The only recent book I have and know of which does this beyond Durey’s Trollope and the Church of England (filled with information, a little encyclopedia about the church at the time but wrong about seeing Trollope as a centrally religious man) is Mark W Turner’s Trollope and the Magazines (who was invited to give a key lecture at the conference but didn’t show); there are newer books with chapters on Trollope (where he is used to prove another agenda about the age or political-sociological insight of the author)

This new collection brings him forward as a force to deal with in his own right engaging in subjects of interest today. I do know from having been at the conference that there was as much interest in him from a post-colonialist perspective as a gender one. I can see this reflected in the titles advertised in the Ashgate brochure. I would use the book as jump-off place.

I have not heard back: I gave a paper Trollope’s Comfort Romances for Men in the conference which was on gender studies and much praised, and which was put on the Victorian website.

As this already long enough and has enough content for one blog, I’ll save a list of the few articles that have been written on film adaptations of Trollope for a future blog. Sarah Cardwell (who has published the excellent and indispensable Andrew Davies and Film Adaptations Revisited has given a paper which I gather is not that well known and I will summarize it (as she was kind enough to send me a copy).

If anyone knows of another radio, TV, or film adaptation, please to let me know and I’ll add it to the above. If there is any error in the above list, ditto.

Ellen

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20 Responses

Dear Ellen, your list of adaptations is very interesting – I somehow wrongly assumed there had been more Trollope adaptations than that. It would be fascinating to see some of the older adaptations – I’d love to see ‘The Small House at Allington’ in particular, but I don’t suppose such old adaptations are very likely to be repeated or released on video or DVD, assuming they even still exist, that is!

I’d like to see the later Barchester Chronicles adapted, as it seems such a pity the Alan Plater series stopped at the first two books. ‘Small House’ would probably be my top choice for a new Trollope mini-series.:) I’m not sure the projected Andrew Davies version of ‘The Pallisers’ will be made any time soon, given the BBC’s current reluctance to spend money on costume dramas, but I hope it will come eventually.

On WordPress, my impression is that categories are supposed to be larger sections of your blog and are listed on your main page, whereas you can have a lot more tags. For instance on my costume dramas blog I have categories for the main authors that I keep writing about, but use tags for all the actors and crew I mention in each production. I don’t think it makes all that much difference whether you use categories or tags, though… I’ve also found I’m sometimes asked to put my password in again, but not every time I go to the site. Judy

Just on categories and tags Ellen – my understanding (which may well be wrong) is pretty similar to Judy’s but not exactly. You can definitely list both Categories and Tags on your main page (along with a whole load of other things) by fiddling with the widgets section – I have both.

Categories are basically for your own organisational purposes and so anyone who visits the site can easily refer to whatever they wish to look at.

Tags have a similar basic function but in some way they are publicised through WordPress – I think they may be the source of the ‘Possibly Related Posts’ feature for instance? – anyway the idea is that they should be much more specific than categories exactly as Judy suggests. Of course there is much overlap bewteen the two. I have Crabbe as both for instance. But Gibbon and Proust (about whom I am not likely to write very often!) are only there as Tags not Catgeories; on the other hand a Tag of Books (which is where they fall in terms of my Categories) would be absurd.

It took me a little while to work all this out but I think it is correct!

As to the signing-in issue this happens to me from time-to-time but I have no real idea why.

Nick has explained it all much better than I did, as I get tied up in knots when trying to be technical:) However, as far as I understand it, the point about publicising things throughout WordPress actually applies to both tags and categories. If you click on any category or tag at the end of a posting, you then go through to a WordPress page with links to a lot of blogs which have this as a tag or category – so for instance if you click on Trollope at the end of one of your postings, Ellen, you would find other blogs mentioning Trollope.

Unfortunately a lot of the blogs I’ve found tend to be spam, but you can sometimes find something interesting, and sometimes a tag can lead someone to your blog.:)

I suggest you take a different tack. Why not submit a book proposal for “Trollope on Film” to McFarland Press? If you look at what they’ve published, your interest is right up their alley:
-Huckleberry Finn on film : film and television adaptations of Mark Twain’s novel, 1920-1993
-Robert Louis Stevenson : life, literature, and the silver screen
-Jane Austen on film and television : a critical study of the adaptations
-The cinematic Jane Austen : essays on the filmic sensibility of the novels
You could also try U of Kentucky Press. They’ve published a number of books on adapting literature to screen.

I believe nothing has ever been published on this topic?–
So why not give that a try!

Thank you very very much for citing a press I can send my work too. I have but one name thus far: Continuum. I do have the name of an editor, but for all I know he might not be working there anymore.

I was thinking I might like to try a book on Trollope eventually too; my idea in the interim was an article. I realize I’m doing an inordinate amount of work first, but I don’t see how I can really grasp what is in 26 episodes without careful study, and careful study of so much means (among other things) really making my memories accurate.

I need to get up a chapter first. I’m doing it on Austen and film. When that’s done, I’ll send it to Continuum. If I get no positive reply or reply at all, I’ll send out to McFarland. I do think I’ll get some reply as I have written them, been encouraged with replies, and they have the printing rights to my one published book, _Trollope on the ‘Net_. If it’s no thank you, now I have another company to send to.

I am grateful for I never know who to turn to for this kind of thing. I am no networker.

My proposal to do a general review of Trollope studies upon the occasion of the publication of this volume of essays, some of which emerged from the Trollope conference 3 summers ago (and which I was not invited to contribute to) was rejected. The grounds cited were the editors or people who decide what is to be published did “not feel the time to be right for a single-author review on Trollope.”

Bullshit. The time could not be riper. They deserve to be placed by Dante in an appropriate circle of hell.

“Not sure what the Trollope proposal was all about, or who you wanted to review for, but one less paper to write will help you get on with your book better. I wish I didn’t have 3 papers to write now, what a complete waste of time!”

To which I replied:

I did say when I saw the ad on an Ashgate flyer, that three of the “big” people at the Trollope conference 3 years ago appear to have gotten together and picked papers read aloud there, mostly from people with credentials or who they thought were getting tenure or “potentially’ “going up,” and made a book of this and now it’s published by Ashgate. That I felt left out because my paper was on the same topic and as good. If it was put up on the Victorian web (which it was) they could have asked me to write something related like it — which is what they did for Polhemus and a couple of others who didn’t write on their topic. So I wanted at least to review it, to be part of them publicly.

My proposal was good and now it’s turned down.

I reread my book and loved it — Trollope on the Net. It’s very good and I know has been read by so many. But never mentioned in academic journals anywhere, and never reviewed by any academic. Annie Finch says reviews are essential. I had Margaret Drabble in the Sunday times and a mention at the end of the Year in the Times as something new and fresh and Mark Turner praised it in his end of year survey of Trollope studies in the Dickens Annual.

In 1961, ITV adapted Barchester Towers as a Play of the Week. Unfortunately neither IMDb onor the TV Times archive have much information on this. In the US Kraft Television Theater dramatised Barchester Towers. This, in turn appears to be a version of a pre-war stage play.

I hate to admit this, but I had never heard of Trollope until today. I have been an Austin/Bronte admirer for years, but I majored in Hispanic Literature so was reading everything Hispanic. Today I picked up Barchester Towers. Should I read the first of the series before reading this, or can I stick my toe in the Trollope water with this one?

It’s fine to begin with Barchester Towers. It’s not the one I’d recommend a young adult woman today: I’d recommend either Small House at Allington (Barsetshire Novel 4) or Can You Forgive Her? (Palliser Novel 1). But BT is very enjoyable — it’s Fieldesque, as in Henry Fielding.

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Since I am a 62 year old retired school teacher I think I am safe to not start with the ones you recommended for young adult women. I will probably end up reading them all anyway. I’ll let you know what I think. One of my retirement goals was to become as versed in English and American Lit as I was in Hispanic Lit…. (Spanish teacher who wanted to get a master’s in something other than education…. I wanted a challenge… I sure got it! )

I’m 66 myself. A retired college teacher. Really Trollope has many wonderful novels and it’s hard to say which to begin with. The real reply is no, you need not read The Warden before reading Barchester Towers. Trollope tells you all that happened in TW and arguably BT is a Victorian-style 3-volume rewrite in very high spirits of TW (a novella). And very enjoyable after you finish is to rent and watch The Barchester Chronicles from Netflix.

Heather White
Thanks for your list it has saved me much searching. Hard to believe there is not more interest in the other 4 books in the Barchestershire series for adaptation for TV. I am running a Classic Novels course at the University of the Third Age on Bribie Island Australia. When we have discussed the novel we then watch the TV series if there is one and we are about to study The Warden and the Barchester Towers so we have the wonderful TV series with the Pleasances in them to look at after. May 28th 2013

[…] Among the earliest of Trollope’s books filmed by the BBC was a The Warden in 1951 (totally wiped out). After that The Eustace Diamonds, Last Chronicle of Barset and The Small House at Allington. The Way We Live Now a first version by Raven followed in 1969; so Trollope was Barsetshire-Palliser with The Way We Live Now vying as a signature book 50 years ago. All wiped out and (thus forgotten). The film performing the work of the first two P&Ps is Raven’s 1974 mini-series, somewhat reinforced by Alan Plater’s complacent comic pastoral 1983 Barchester Chronicles, and these together assumed milieu-world-norms that other Trollope film adaptations have had to align themselves with or overcome (unfortunately Herbert Wise’s 1976 Malachi’s Cove has left hardly a trace in Trollopian public memory, though Andrew Davies’s 2003 The Way We Live Now has made some inroads, his daring He Knew He Was Right with its strong feminism and weak men out of Trollope has not found favor). […]